“David Sheff knows addiction as no parent would ever want. Through it all, he’s tapped into a unique ability to convey the pain, wisdom and love that he’s experienced through many turbulent years with his son Nic. As a journalist, father and clear-eyed chronicler of addiction, David is without peer.”

– Sanjay Gupta, MD Chief Medical Correspondent, CNN

Author’s Biography

David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, a number-one New York Times bestseller. The book was based on his article, “My Addicted Son,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine and won a special award from the American Psychological Association for “outstanding contribution to the understanding of addiction.” Beautiful Boy, published in a dozen language, was named the year’s Best Nonfiction Book by Entertainment Weekly, an Amazon “Best Books of 2008,” and it won first place in the Barnes and Noble Discover Award in nonfiction. In 2009, David was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the World’s Most Influential People. A feature film adaptation of “Beautiful Boy,” produced by Amazon Studios and Plan B Entertainment and starring Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet, was released in the U.S. in October 2018 and internationally in February 2019.

David followed Beautiful Boy with Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy, also a New York Times bestseller. Clean was the result of the years David spent investigating the disease of addiction and America’s drug problem, which he sees as the greatest public health challenge of our time. The Partnership for Drug-free Kids honored him with a Special Tribute Award “in recognition of his voice and leadership for families who are struggling with addiction.” He was also awarded the College of Problems on Drug Dependence (CPDD) Media Award, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) Media Award, and American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) Media Award “to recognize his compelling portrayal of addiction and its personal effects on families and society as a whole.”

David also contributed to HBO’s Addiction: Why Can’t They Just Stop. Along with The New York Times Magazine, he has written for The New York Times, Wired, Rolling Stone, Outside, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Playboy, Esquire and Observer Magazine in England, Foreign Literature in Russia, and Playboy (Shueisha) in Japan. He has conducted seminal interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, Steve Jobs, Ansel Adams, nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, Congressman Barney Frank, Tom Hanks, Betty Friedan, Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson, Carl Sagan, Salman Rushdie, Fareed Zakaria, and others. He also wrote an award-winning documentary about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and a radio special about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, both for National Public Radio.

David’s other books include Game Over, called “the bible of the videogame industry” by The Wall Street Journal, and “beguiling” and “irresistible. . . almost as hypnotic as a successful video game” by The New York Times. Author Gore Vidal said that China Dawn, David’s book about the Internet revolution in China, is a “fascinating…study of go–getting businessmen in a revived China bound to shape our future.” All We Are Saying, based on David’s interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, was a Literary Guild Selection book. Charles Champlin, Arts Editor of the Los Angeles Times, wrote: “David Sheff’s sympathetic questions evoked so much of the Beatle past and of Lennon’s intellectual past and present and future plans that the interview would hardly have been less engrossing and important even it if were not illuminated by tragedy.”

He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. David lives with his family in Northern California.

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“David Sheff knows addiction as no parent would ever want. Through it all, he’s tapped into a unique ability to convey the pain, wisdom and love that he’s experienced through many turbulent years with his son Nic. As a journalist, father and clear-eyed chronicler of addiction, David is without peer.”

– Sanjay Gupta, MDChief Medical Correspondent, CNN

“David Sheff wrote a book in 2008 that became a kind of landmark. Beautiful Boy, a painful, personal story of the battle he tried to fight with and alongside his son, Nic, who was addicted to methamphetamines. The book became an international best-seller and made David Sheff one of the country’s most prominent voices on addiction — not as a doctor, an addict or an academic expert, but as a father. Sheff has continued to try to figure out a road that can lead out of addiction, and he presents that route in his new book, Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy.”

– Scott Simon, Weekend Edition National Public Radio

“David Sheff is a skilled journalist on an urgent mission. He prevailed over the anger and hopelessness he felt at his son’s affliction by calling upon great reserves of love and discipline to investigate what might help — first as a father and then, in this book, as a reporter and an advocate. His forbearance and clearheadedness could serve as an example for America as it confronts its drug problem. He has performed a vital service by compiling sensible advice on a subject for which sensible advice is in short supply.”